The present invention relates to a pressureless tennis ball having excellent rebound properties and a good feeling of striking.
Two types of tennis balls are known, one being pressurized tennis balls wherein the hollow core is pressurized by means of air or a certain kind of gas to about 0.6-1.2 kg/cm.sup.2 higher pressure than atmospheric pressure, and the other being pressureless tennis balls wherein the internal pressure of the hollow core is approximately equal to atmospheric pressure, for example, the excess pressure being 0 or up to about 0.4 kg/cm.sup.2.
The pressurized tennis balls have good rebound properties (flight performance) and give a good feeling when struck by a racket, since the pressure of air or the gas in the core contributes to improvements in rebound properties of the balls and feeling of striking the balls. However, air or the gas of super-atmospheric pressure contained in the core gradually diffuses out through the core wall owing to a pressure difference between the inside and outside of the core, and the internal pressure decreases in several months. Consequently, the rebound properties of the balls are reduced, thus the flight of the balls is reduced and the balls are no longer satisfactorily used. It is accordingly necessary for the pressurized tennis balls to be used within a certain specified term after the manufacture, or to be kept in pressurized containers prior to use for preventing the decrease of the internal pressure. However, these procedures are inconvenient and expensive.
The pressureless tennis balls have been developed in order to eliminate such a defect of the pressurized tennis balls. The pressureless tennis balls have no problem of the lowering in ball properties resulting from the decrease of the pressure in the core as encountered in pressurized tennis balls. However, the rebound properties, feeling of striking and the like of the pressureless tennis balls must rely on the impact resilience of the rubber composition itself which constitutes the core, because there is no contribution of the pressure in the core to the rebound properties and striking feeling of the balls. The rebound properties and striking feeling on the level of pressurized tennis balls cannot be achieved by merely applying rubber compositions used for the cores of pressurized tennis balls to the production of cores for the pressureless tennis balls.
Accordingly, in order to bring the rebound properties and the feeling of striking close to those of the pressurized tennis balls, it is proposed to improve these properties by incorporating in rubber compositions for tennis ball core a high styrene resin, a rubber such as ethylene-propylene rubber or ethylene-propylene-diene rubber, or an additive such as an ionomer resin or wood flour as disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Publication Kokai No. 55-96171 and No. 54-34934 and Japanese Patent Publication Kokoku No. 46-25289.
However, pressureless tennis balls available at the present time are hard and do not give a satisfactory feeling when struck by a racket. The softer ones are poor in flight and do not give a feeling of striking like pressurized tennis balls. Moreover, the softer pressureless tennis balls have the defects that the resistance to deformation is markedly lowered by repeated forceful striking during game or playing, so the feeling of striking becomes too soft and the flight of balls also further decreases.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a pressureless tennis ball having characteristics comparable to those of pressurized tennis balls such as rebound properties and feeling of striking.
The above and other objects of the present invention will become apparent from the description hereinafter.